bento

Hugo and I share a big fat geek crush on FileMaker. We both love it like whoa. Hugo is the FM programmer, though. My eyes glaze and my heart skips a few beats when I have to create a new database…so I don’t do it. I know of it’s awesome and the power it has over me is kind of amusing and overwhelming.

So when I saw Bento I had a wee stroke and decided it was going to make my life amazingly organized without pain or tears. Hahahaha. I tried to run this 10.5 disc we had and it was some weird factory upgrade. It trashed my OS. Insert mad dash to the Apple store here. I didn’t want to lose anything that was on the drive so I finally put my 250gb upgrade drive in the MacBook; this was the most painless part of the weekend…I love you Apple, you bitches.

Why am I telling you all this? Because Bento requires 10.5 and I was happily running 10.4 and I want you to know all the silliness I endured so I could install a single app. It had better be freaking AMAZING, right?

Eleventy hours later (CS3 takes an ungodly amount of time to install…) I have all my apps plus iWork 08 and Bento. Wheee!

It hasn’t made me faint from joy or anything yet, but I don’t have iCal, Address Book, or Mail setup yet. So far I have a pantry database. I have a barcode scanner so I can scan an item, it pops up in the inventory. I can put down how many we have, rate it with stars, do an average cost, cost store by store (shopping buggies need laptop holders), cross reference ingredients with a recipe database (that doesn’t exist yet), take a photo of the product with the iSight, have coupon y/n field, and can print any items that Quantity=0.

Yes, this obsession with being organized and having everything in a database is probably unhealthy. (I once spent months using Delicious Library … meticulously entering all of my books, DVDs, games, etc. Then my hard drive melted. Fail. Always run your backup, folks.)

My main goal for Bento was to get my work flow organized (Customer database, time lines, organized documents by client…) but I think it’s going to work wonders for my menu planning/shopping issues.

wesabe

Keeping with the hyper organizer theme, I decided to get my finances in order last week. I confiscated a hanging file box from the basement, organized a bunch of stuff in folders, and decided I needed to stop getting paper statements from my banks.

I revisited the thought of using MS Money again. I no longer have my Dell laptop and while using it on the road wasn’t wise it was convenient. I started searching for Mac finance apps. They all suck. I wasn’t able to find one that didn’t make me cringe, anyway. (Go check out Cha-Ching)

Then I had the brilliant idea that I was going to use Mint.com …neither of my banks were supported. Major bummer because it is gorgeous and I love a good pie chart.

Enter Wesabe. Instead of using an SSL connection to talk to your bank, you go to your bank, download a datafile, and upload it yourself into their server. From there you can tag things in 2 ways. For instance, Taco Bell got tagged as Food. So any time Taco Bell came up ever again it was tagged as a Food expense.

You can also do 1 time tags. For instance Panera Bread was tagged as Food but one-time tags could be biz-lunch and reimbursable so I could view my reimbursable tags and see what I need to put on my expense report at the end of the month. I wouldn’t do that, but I could.

After a few hours I had all of my things imported, tagged, and was sufficiently horrified at how mindless my spending has been over the last 2 years. My biggest expense? Food. Weight Watchers, here I come. Second biggest expense? Books and music. You can be in more than one 12 step program at a time, right?

wordpress 2.5

It’s not so disastrous as I had thought it might be. From the way people were talking it seemed that nothing worked. Touch wood…so far so good.

The new interface is rather swanky. After 6+ years of using WP (omg) it wasn’t too terribly difficult to get used to. It did, however, take me 5 minutes to figure out where the time stamp modification area was. It also seems to run a bit zippier than previous versions…I’d be interested in some benchmarks on this.

cosmo

Watching this movie once wrecked me for about a week and I can’t even talk to people about it in real life because I get so emotional about it.

I read dianne sylvan’s journal. She is a pagan author and I like her books a lot. She’s pretty snarky…which I find amusing. Last week she had to say goodbye to her cat, Cosmo. I was shaking and in tears reading it. I don’t know her or her cat but it bothered me a great deal. You see, I’ve had to give away animals…I’ve had animals run away…but I’ve never had to watch one die. I think it will probably kill me, part of me if nothing else, and I am not looking forward to it.

Happy trails, Cosmo.

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